This Is The Movie You'll Want To See More Than Once In 2019

You'll fall in love with these two, fast. Image: UniversalSource:Whimn

'Booksmart' is worth every penny.

For the last two years of high school, I was kind of intense.

Fuelled by determination to succeed in my final HSC exams and leave school with marks in the top 5%, I preferred spending my weekend at the library to going on outings to the shops or the beach. I wasn’t particularly ashamed of how hard I was trying, but would often fend off slights from peers who didn’t care as much about their marks. Don’t get me wrong, I had a social life and friends – though I realise saying that certainly makes it seem like the opposite. But my studies were among my top two priorities: succeeding at school was second only to figuring out how to become Mrs. Harry Styles.

Looking back, I think the only reason I don’t regret how I approached those final two years because in the end, I achieved everything I set out to do, validating the ‘caring-too-much’ effort I put into it all. For people like me, Booksmart is a somewhat confronting – if not totally infectious – depiction of what could have happened if that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Best friends Molly and Amy are type-A overachievers like I was in high school. Molly (Beanie Feldstein) is valedictorian, student body President, off to her first-choice college Yale, plans on being the youngest Supreme Court justice in history and is secretly in love with her Vice President, Nick(Mason Gooding). Amy (Kaitlin Denver) is a wannabe activist who is taking a gap year to volunteer in Botswana before going off to Columbia and has a huge crush on skater girl, Ryan (Victoria Ruesga).

Neither of the girls has acted on their respective crushes because they spent all of their time consumed by studying and getting into their Ivy League colleges. They think they’ve done it, right, as well because it worked and everything is working out just as they planned. So they look down on and pity their peers who spent time getting drunk at parties, having sex and generally experience their teenage years rather than being in any rush to fast-track their adolescence. Molly even goes so far as to enact a rule that none of the seniors talk about college acceptances because she doesn’t want any of them to feel bad for not getting into an Ivy like she and Amy did.

This rule though, and their broader approach to success, backfires in the most spectacular way when she overhears her peers shit-talking about her in the toilet and confronts them only to discover that they all got into good colleges, too. The ‘slut’ is also going to Yale “I’m incredible at hand-jobs but I also got a 1560 on the SATs”, the ‘skater boy’ got a scholarship to Stanford and the ‘stoner’ is skipping college altogether and going straight onto earning six figures at Google.

Her entire life flashing before her eyes, Molly can’t believe what she’s hearing. “This is not possible! You guys don’t even care about school!” she protests. “No, we just don’t only care about school,” they tell her.

'Booksmart' is being called a future classic. Image: YoutubeSource:Whimn

With Amy, the two decide to make up for their lost time (and experiences) on the last night of high school. They approach the task with the same kind of dogged determination they applied to their studies, with Molly exclaiming, “I’m going to experience a seminal fun anecdote!” What ensues is an hour and a half of pure comedic joy. The girls realise that despite knowing everything, there are some massive gaps in their knowledge, such as knowing the address of the house party they’re trying to get to - or even how to procure it.

The ensemble cast of peers add colour to the already vibrant tapestry of this film. Billie Lourd is laugh-out-loud funny as the weird rich girl, every teen girl will likely go follow Diana Silvers on Instagram after watching her performance as the mean hot girl and you can’t help but love the billionaire’s son (Skyler Gisondo) who desperately wants to be liked.

Unlike other teen buddy coming-of-age comedies, in which sexual conquests come at the expense of women’s objectification, the love plotlines in Booksmart are only peripheral to the greater love story that is Amy and Molly’s. The chemistry is addictive, with the film including various interludes in which they act as the hype girl for one another, dolling out compliments that steadily get more and more hyperbolic and ridiculous. It’s the kind of devotion to building someone up that any woman will recognise instantly from years of doing just that for female friends who constantly struggle with self-confidence in a world that tells us we’re simultaneously ‘not enough’ and ‘too much’.

This is a film in which a queer character's sexuality is refreshingly treated as a non-issue. More please! Image: UniversalSource:Whimn

Feldstein and Denver buoy the film, with their portrayal already drawing comparisons to the iconic duo of our hearts: Romy and Michelle. But their night of debauchery will also test the limits of their bond, forcing them to confront the fact that even for a pair who share everything from study notes to the experience of watching lesbian porn for the first time, there are still things they may have been keeping from one another.

A lot of people have come out criticising the film for being a little too cotton candy sweet, not showing the more confronting aspects of teenage life today a la Euphoria. People believe that in the world of Booksmart, these kids seem almost too shielded. Whether or not this will matter to you comes down to what you go in wanting to get out of this film. Do you want an incisive critique of gender, class and racial inequality today? If so, you should probably second-guess your ticket. Do you want to have a good time? Booksmart is for you.

This isn’t a film that takes itself too seriously, even if it does have characters who are politically engaged enough to have Elizabeth Warren for Pres bumper stickers on their cars. They’re kids, after all, and these things don’t need to be so deep. It’s a joyous, very fun and very funny teen film that will have you feeling as though you’ve just been injected with a highly concentrated dose of dopamine. If that’s not good enough to warrant multiple excursions to the cinema then I don’t know what is.